A web service is a software function hosted at a network accessible address over the World Wide Web, (i.e., the Internet). A typical web service may have an interface which is used by web-based applications, or other web services, to invoke the web service. Representational state transfer (REST)-based (hereinafter referred to as RESTful) web services may have interfaces consisting of a set of addressable resources that may be accessed in a stateless manner using a set of RESTful operations. Simple object access protocol (SOAP)-based web services may have interfaces consisting of an arbitrary set of procedures which may be invoked.
Current web services may lack standardized service level interfaces. Instead, web service interfaces may use proprietary interfaces. For example, SOAP-based web services may support their own proprietary set of interface procedures, while RESTful web services may support their own proprietary set of interface resources. This may create a problem, since to effectively interface to a web service may require the developer of an application to customize that application such that it is compatible with each web service it interfaces.